New Delhi, Oct 29 (IANS): A team from Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations unit and the Cyber Crime Unit of the Special Cell has busted a module pretending to be government officials running an online complaint redressal system.
The Cyber Crime Unit arrested 12 persons including two women for running the online redressal system and pretending to be government officials. Police also recovered 7 laptops and 25 mobiles, one Maruti car and Rs 52,500 cash from the syndicate.
Police said that a complaint was registered alleging that while the person was trying to complain about an incident of cheating, he came across one website i.e www.jansurkashakendara.in claiming to be a crime reporting portal. He called on the mobile phone number listed on the website, and a person informed him that they are the authorized persons working with the government and they would lodge his complaint regarding the cheating. On the pretext of lodging and investigating his complaint, they charged him Rs 2850. Once the payment was received by them, they blocked the number. A case was registered in this regard.
As the investigation proceeded further, it was revealed that people who had been cheated by fraudsters were being cheated again on the pretext of helping them while impersonating as government authorized personnel. Similar complaints were found registered at the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. During investigation, it was revealed that the fraudsters had received Rs 1,74,00,000 in the past year.
Police said they were targeting those individuals who had already been cheated and when these individuals tried to lodge a formal complaint, they used to hit these web pages having similar nomenclature. The impersonators employed search engine optimization to get these websites reflected on the search query.
The accused persons created a website in the name of www.jansurakshakendra.in and attracted the cybercrime victims to lodge complaints on their website. They used the method of search engine optimization to attract traffic and have their website listed on Google search engine, whenever search queries were generated by the users. They used to charge money from the victims ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 30000 on the pretext of lodging and investigating their complaint. After receiving the money, the accused persons generally blocked the number of the victims.
The accused persons had created some more similar websites with names like Jan Shikayat Kendra, Grahak Suraksha Kendra, Nyaya Bharat and others, said police.